Beyond the Starport Adventure (Bullet Book 1)

by Richard Fairbairn

  The lights in his quarters were dimmed. Gentle string music played unobtrusively from his console. Soo Maa's holographic photograph smiled at him as he caught her eye.

  “Jaxx is difficult,” he said slowly, “He's uptight, angry. Worse than when you met him. Much worse. I don't think I'm going to stay here long. The crew... Jaxx... Ah, I don't know what I'm even talking about. It's late. We've been running exercises all day.”

  He stopped and stared at her picture. She moved softly, mimicking life, and blinked randomly. He wasn't sure if he preferred the moving picture, but it had been a gift.

  “Jaxx is old school. Old, old school. He's deeply religious, but it’s more than that. He's a war veteran. I mean, he's much older than I realised and he fought on Relathon. That's where his injuries come from. He was captured and tortured by a Relathon terrorist group. He hates the Relathon almost like we're still at war. But its more than that. He takes his religion very seriously and very strictly. It’s a huge influence on his command, his judgement and his life.

  “I think he despises me. On the bridge the atmosphere is as thick as cheese. The crew share his... views. Or they've adjusted to him enough that they're all just one happy ship. Besides, they wouldn't dare oppose him. His eyes are venomous and his soul... Well, let's just say that he hates me. Not because I don't share his religious views, but because he thinks I'm weak. Sometimes I think he's mad, but I think he's just twisted and tortured by hate. And the old ways fit him like a glove, believe me.

  Gods, to think that this battleship is his to command.”

  There was a square glass of brown liquid beside his right hand. He lifted it up, turned it round ninety degrees and then lifted it to his lips. The whisky was strong and good. It was a Relathon blend. Fifty years ago he'd have been executed for owning the bottle. Ten years ago he'd have been thrown out of the service. Even now he wouldn't dare let Jaxx see the bottle.

  “The times have changed,” he mused, “But not enough and not quickly enough. But change can never be made too hastily. The Crystallists have still got a strong influence over the empire. Sometimes it’s difficult to know where the government ends and the Crystallists begin, or if there's any distinction between the two.”

  He hesitated and drank the whiskey. It was a pleasant taste; inviting and warm. It wasn't the best he'd tasted. In fact, some Enrilean blends he'd tried suited his palate more. But there was something deliciously illicit about the alien whiskey. Drinking it appealed to his rebellious side.

  “My father,” he paused a long time, remembering, “My father must have been a Crystallist. I don't remember him praying or anything, but he'd quote the name of the Gods when it suited him,” he censored himself and waited a long time before he spoke again. But he couldn't join the threads of conversation together. The whiskey didn't help. He smiled, mostly internally, because he was pleased that one tortured memory had not spread to his love, the beautiful Jassminn.

  “Jaxx reminds me of my father. You never met my father. I don't think I would have wanted you to. But Jaxx takes me right back to my childhood. Sometimes,” he added with a little extra thought. “Sometimes he's much worse than my father. Dad might have quoted some of the Crystallist ways – along with a few he probably made up on his own – but Jaxx is a dyed in the wool Crystallist. It’s as much a part of his life as the captaincy of this ship. And that's the frightening thing. It really is. I didn't expect the fleet would be anything like this.”

  He stopped and touched the back of his hand against her picture. She smiled in response to his gentle touch. He lifted his glass of whiskey and took a long drink. He was about to stop then realised the glass was almost empty. He kept drinking and emptied the glass.

  “Relathon spirit, 2130,” he read the bottle label out loud, “Restricted to class C persons and above. That's me. Class C.”

  There were remnants of the old, original label. He imagined it had been an label with an image of a mountain, fields or a valley. The new label was white with bold blue lettering and a red stamp. The stamp was an approval by some bureaucrat. Some faceless, officious and no doubt deeply religious pawn in the never ending chess game of government, religion, hypocrisy.

  The bottle was almost empty. He'd had too much to drink. He didn't feel it, but he would in the morning. At 7am, he'd struggle. Maybe it wasn't that bad. Jaxx might think him more of a man if he smelled the whiskey.

  “Gods, no,” he said aloud, and laughed. He shook his head and stared at the little camera. He was looking into his wife's eyes, countless miles away. The tiny light and the little glass dots were her delicious brown eyes. “Sorry Jassminn. I was just thinking that the captain might be impressed if he smelled the whiskey on my breath, that it might bring me closer to what I imagine his approximation of a real officer is. But then I remembered that its Relathon whiskey. He'd most likely be able to tell the difference,” he closed his eyes and laughed again, softly, “Gods, he'd probably throw me into space.”

  He shook his head, still laughing.

  “Sorry Jassmin. Instead of a romantic love message you're getting the ramblings of a drunk. Ahh... but it’s been a difficult day. Maybe tomorrow will be better. Maybe not. Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe we'll finally follow the big arrow in the sky and make it to paradise. Maybe the Gods will be waiting for us and they'll tell Jaxx that his religion is all wrong. Or maybe they'll be waiting to shake his hand and slap him on the back. And what they'll do to me? Well, maybe Jaxx will just shove his crystal dagger into my heart as they applaud him and pour blessed wine over his head.”

  He stopped talking. He'd said too much. She was miles away. She was beyond distance. He didn't want her to worry, at least he didn't in his conscious mind. He loved her. He missed her. And he needed her. He needed comforting. He needed to share his doubts, his hopes, his fears.

  “I never understood why we saw the Relathon as weak,” He said, finally, “They fought hard and in ways the history books haven't recorded. But there are secret recordings of battles won and lost by the Relathon. They were brave fighters, like we were, not the weakling cowards that the Empire would have everyone believe. I've never spoken about it. To do so would have condemned me as a heretic or traitor. My new Captain knows of the evil that war brought out in the Relathon. He experienced it first hand, Gods help him, even if his own internal fire burned through the hatred of his enemies. Our enemies,” He added, weakly.

  He sighed long. The whiskey glass was empty. He refilled it. Not so much this time. Half the measure he'd poured before. It was getting late. He'd drunk too much, but not enough that having another didn't matter to him. He lifted the glass carefully, thoughtfully, and closed his eyes as he sipped the amber liquid.

  A light came onto his console. The long range communication system was working on a priority transmission. He expected the light to go out in a few seconds but it stayed on. Then another light appeared. Something important was being relayed.

  “I don't know if my father hammered the old ways into me too hard. I wonder if that's why I have my doubts and my reservations about the Empire, about the weak being fodder for the strong. I don't know if that’s why I question it. Perhaps my father's insistence on adhering to the strict rules and constraints forced me to rebel as so many of the younger, dare I say “more enlightened”, Enrileans are these days. It doesn't matter.”

  The light on the console went out. Something had happened. Something important. He knew that. He didn’t realise just how important it was. He was sick of the whiskey now, suddenly, but to leave it would be wrong. He finished the glass in one quick swoop.

  “I don't think I believe in cruel Gods.,” He said the words like a breath. Less than a whisper, almost less than a sound, “I don't even think that Cranntarr was destroyed by the Crystal Warriors. I think…”

  The console light was back on. More high priority communications. Much shorter this time. It distracted him. It brought his thoughts back to the present time and place.

  “I'm sorry.”r />
  The last statement was unnecessary. Jassmin would never hear it, just as she'd never hear the rest of his recording. His finger did not hover at all but pressed the appropriate button to delete his entire transcript. The beautiful Jassmin would never hear it.

  Captain Jaxx had already heard everything.

  2195AD - Spirit of the Future.

  The Spirit of the Future was travelling through the same wormhole it had negotiated hundreds of times before. The automatic systems had taken care of almost everything. The bridge crew had responded to a few minor alerts, supervising the odd correction here and there. Then, after fifteen minutes, a dull klaxon sounded for the first time ever. It was a alert nobody had ever heard before – at least in the control room of the massive cruise ship.

  The navigator smiled briefly, almost excited. He flicked off the chess screen and took one final spin of the virtual roulette wheel before closing that screen too. Then, confident that his console showed only what it should be showing, he decided to speak.

  “Captain, I’m showing a distortion of the wormhole in six hours twenty eight minutes. ”

  Captain Mike Talbot nodded slowly, considering. He fingered his greying beard. The Spirit of the Future was his first command, and he was standing in for a colleague who’d fallen ill. He wasn’t enjoying commanding the ship. He could sense animosity from the crew. They were used to a younger captain. They were used to a different way of doing things, that was clear.

  “Can you define ‘distortion’ for me, Lieutenant Maxwell, or shall we just guess for ourselves?” he said somewhat a little too harshly.

  Maxwell replied evenly: “Gravitational weakness of the third magnitude. Possibly a result of a large uncharted celestial body moving across the wormhole’s spatial expanse.”

  “Thanks, Mr Maxwell. Can we ride it out?”

  “It’s third magnitude, Captain.”

  A third magnitude distortion was little more than a ripple, but the rules were very clear. The wormhole was to be considered unstable, even if the distortion would hardly be felt by anyone on the ship.

  “Take us into normal space,” the Captain said quietly, “Send a burst message back home. Tell them we’re transferring to an alternate. And plot the course, please.”

  “Aye sir,” the navigator replied, “Computer is already plotting an alternate.”

  When the ship entered normal space about thirty passengers were awake. If they noticed the slight wobble of the ship as it entered normal space, none of them paid any attention to it. None of them realised that this wasn’t normal. The swirling view out the window had changed to a brighter starry vista, but few looked to see. They’d done the windows already. That was old hat.

  It took some time for the junior navigator to find an alternate route and when he did, he made a critical mistake. After sitting idle in normal space for about four hours, the Spirit of the Future re-entered a much older, long unused wormhole. It hadn’t been probed for five years and sitting at the end of it lay the long dormant Enrilean space buoy.

  The Spirit of the Future sailed gently through the swirling tunnel between one point in space and another. The passengers would be told be told of the diversion in the morning.

  Matt Silverman was asleep. He’d had an unproductive night stalking the bar, trying to convince a non-existent audience that he was enjoying himself alone. He’d drunk too much and had made himself sick trying to impress a quietly horrified young barmaid by trying to extinguish a cigarette using nothing more than his lips. He’d had to leave just when the dancing started in the ballroom. By the time he got back to his room he was staggering. He barely managed to undress before falling into a heavy sleep.

  The Spirit of the Future observed SST – Space Standard Time which, in real terms, boiled down to Pacific Daylight Time. It was four a.m. in Seattle, and four a.m. halfway across the galaxy when the ageing space liner entered the alternate wormhole. It proceeded more slowly than normal, but still at speeds that could not even be expressed in the terms used for travel in normal space.

  SIX

  2195AD - Jann Linn Mountain.

  She knew that her father would not allow her to travel to the city, so she waited until he fell asleep and headed down the mountainside towards the bright lights below. She had not asked her father’s permission, so she was not disobeying his wishes. She told herself this, but she knew somewhere inside that she was.

  She knew he’d be angry with her. And she decided that he’d be proud too.

  Introverted, her current state of mind interested her. Usually she could trace her thought processes completely, but this time she was confused. It was something to do with Zinn. Something to do with the Enrilean commander or her father’s reaction to him and then working on the old transport ship afterwards. Something in that chain of events had made her want to visit the city below, but she really could not think exactly why she was doing it.

  “Impulsive,” She spoke the word softly out loud. It was lost in the cold biting wind coming in from the sea to the west but she said it anyway.

  Jann Linn’s habitat lay near the top of Jann Linn mountain. The city was eight miles below in the valley. The city was called Jann Linn city. The mountain and the city were named after her father. He was a revered scientist. The most famous dead person on the planet.

  It was a bright moonlit night. Cass was making good time down the mountainside. She’d make the city by dawn – seven hours away. She hadn’t thought that Jann Linn would waken up before she could make it back to the habitat.

  In her whole life she had only ever spoken to Jann Linn. Her father. Nobody else knew she existed. He’d hidden her from the only visitors to the mountain, and the only visitors to the mountain were the handful of evil Enrileans who kept her father as a slave.

  Years before, when he’d been taken against his will to Enrilea, the people of the planet Relathon had been told that he’d died on the way there. Not that many had either wondered or cared where he’d gone. To many he’d died when his wife had been killed during the Enrilean occupation and memory of his existence had faded. The permanent transfer to the Enrilean science labs had not turned out the way the Enrilean scientists had planned. Jann Linn’s fake demise had almost become an all too real disaster as he’d slowly poisoned himself. The Enrileans had not believed Jann Linn when he had told them that living on the mountain was essential to his health. They knew that he’d been poisoning himself. But it was impossible to deny him the means to harm himself whilst allowing his work to continue. Besides, the quality of his work became practically non-existent. Therefore, months after his incarceration began, it ended with his return to his mountain – albeit a secret new location. It seemed Jann had been right. He couldn’t live anywhere besides atop this beautiful mountain.

  And it was beautiful. Even at night she could feel everything like a sensory blanket surrounding and covering her with its brilliance. It had always been this way for her. Fascinating. Enchanting. Amazing. But recently her perception had become even more acute. She seemed to see more. Perhaps it was the “change of mind” that her father had mentioned; a stage of life that all Relathon children went through before their ascent to adulthood. But her memories were still intact – or at least they seemed to be. It was impossible to be sure, she reasoned, but she thought she could remember everything.

  She watched the skies as she stumbled down the rocks. In the blue night she could see the two moons

  in the sky and the distant orange disc that was Crantarr. Enrilea was below the horizon, but most nights this was visible too. There were many stars. Too many to count, but she tried anyway. It was one of the games she habitually played and probably the one that frustrated her father most of all.

  The habitat was almost two miles behind her now and she was making good time. The city lay another six or more miles ahead. It was hard to judge how far exactly. The lights were bright – almost as bright as the stars – and they were easier to count. Cass decided to count the city li
ghts instead as she walked. Even that was more difficult than she first thought. Some of the lights would go on and off every now and then and she could never be sure if she’d counted the same light twice. After another mile she gave up.

  Jann Linn had never allowed her to go to the city before. He said it was dangerous. He said that the people there were never to know of his existence, or of her existence. But it saddened Cass because in the whole universe nobody knew about her existence besides Jann Linn. And if he went away again… She couldn’t even consider what she would do if he left her alone again. That time of her life had been the worst possible time. She’d never been lonely before then - or hungry or cold or scared. She couldn’t take it one more time.

  She’d decided to go to the city a few times before, but each time something had changed her mind before the night would fall. A new thought would enter her head and the new thought would make the old thought obsolete or impossible. But this time the new thoughts that told her not to travel to the city didn’t dissuade her. The impulse to travel there and to see another Relathon face was too strong. It casually interested her that Jann had not realised this. But he was always unwell after the Enrileans came to see him. She did not know what they did to him to make him ill, but they did.

  She knew that later, Jann Linn would ask her why she'd done this. She wouldn’t know what to answer. But she thought about the three dead birds she'd seen and wondered if he would understand, even if she didn't, why that had made her restless. It was painful to remember the dead birds. They had been alive, but not for long. Their eyes had never opened. Three little lifes, all in a row, briefly alive and then dead.

  She continued down the mountain. She kept the image of the birds in her mind. She didn't want to, but they were burned in her memory.

  2195AD - Spirit of the Future